Overview
Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is a federal, state and local effort to enable and encourage children, including those with disabilities, to
walk and bicycle to school - and to make walking and bicycling to school safe and appealing.
In New Jersey, as in other parts of this country, travel to school by walking and bicycling has declined dramatically over the past several
decades. The adverse impacts of this trend on air quality, traffic congestion and childhood health are alarming.
The goal of New Jersey's Safe Routes to School Program (pdf 3.6 mb) is to assist New Jersey communities in developing and implementing projects and
programs that encourage walking and bicycling to school while enhancing the
safety of these trips.
These programs can bring a wide range of benefits to students and the community. These include an easy way for children to get the regular
physical activity they need for good health and even to ease traffic jams and reduce pollution around schools.
A major goal of the program is to increase bicycle, pedestrian and traffic safety.
Successful Safe Routes to School programs in the United States usually includes one or more of these
approaches: engineering, enforcement, education, encouragement.
Local and regional government, schools and community non-profit organizations ready, willing and able to implement SRTS initiatives are
eligible to apply for funding.
On December 22, 2008, the New Jersey Department of Transportation awarded (pdf 28k) $4 million in federal SRTS funds, providing grants for projects in 33 municipalities, in amounts ranging from $8,000 to $300,000. Twenty infrastructure projects were funded at over $3.5 million and eleven non-infrastructure projects received over $430,000.
The file above is in Portable Document Format (PDF). You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file, which is available at our state Adobe Access page. |
